Tag Archives: film

The Many Lives of Robin Hood

Posted on by Steve Higgins

One of my unofficial New Year’s resolutions this year was to try and declutter, perhaps actually get rid of some of my huge DVD collection. It’s not always that easy though. Mooching around one of those cheap secondhand shops recently I picked up yet another DVD. I’ll tell you about it in more detail later but it was one of the many films made about Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

My first introduction to Robin Hood was a book I was given for Christmas as a child. There were two parts to it; one was the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the second part was about Robin Hood. I don’t have the book anymore and I have no idea who wrote it but I always look for it when I happen to come across a good secondhand book shop. If I ever found it, it would give me a great thrill to read that book again because I have loved the stories of King Arthur and Robin, ever since.

That unknown book had all the elements of the Robin Hood story we have come to know and love. There was Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Little John, the Sheriff of Nottingham and much more.

The first time I saw Robin Hood on TV was the TV series starring Richard Greene as Robin. There were four series of the TV show which was first produced in 1955. I must have seen repeats shown in the 1960’s but just like that book, all the elements of the Robin Hood story were there and in particular there was a really catchy theme tune and song which even now I can still remember:

Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
Riding through the glen.
Robin Hood, Robin Hood,
With his band of men.
Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!

Yes, they just don’t write them like that anymore.

So who is Robin Hood some of you may be asking? He is a character in old English folklore who was an outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. He was a renowned archer and he and his men wore Lincoln Green outfits and lived in Sherwood Forest. In some stories he is of noble birth, in others he is not. In some Robin has served in the Crusades with Richard the Lionheart although many of the stories show Robin at odds with Prince John, the King’s brother, who plans to usurp the King who is away on the Crusades.

According to Wikipedia the first known reference to Robin Hood comes from a ballad from the 1370’s.

In the silent film days Hollywood brought Robin Hood to the screen starring Douglas Fairbanks Junior as the legendary hero.

The film was released in 1922 and was the first film to ever have a Hollywood première. It featured huge sets including a castle and an entire town built at the Fairbank’s studio on Santa Monica Boulevard made to look even bigger on screen with hanging models and matte paintings.

There is also a famous scene where Fairbanks, who did many of his own stunts, rode down a huge curtain at Nottingham castle, made slightly easier with a slide concealed behind the curtain.

Probably the best ever Robin Hood film is the one I mentioned earlier which I picked up on DVD at a charity shop. The Adventures of Robin Hood starred Errol Flynn as Robin, and Olivia De Havilland as Maid Marian. The film differs from many other portrayals of the Robin Hood story in that the main villain of the film is Sir Guy of Gisborne rather than the Sheriff of Nottingham. Basil Rathbone played Guy and the Sheriff  is portrayed as something of a comic figure by Melville Cooper.

Incredibly, James Cagney was supposed to play Robin but he had a major disagreement with Warner Brothers and walked off the lot, not making another film for two years. The studio turned instead to their new star, Errol Flynn. He had shot to stardom in the Film Captain Blood and shortly before production began the studio decided to film the project in their new Technicolor process.

A lot of the film was shot in California’s Bidwell Park which substituted for Sherwood Forest with some scenes shot at the Warner Ranch in Calabasas.

The film had two directors, William Keighley and latterly, Michael Curtiz who was asked to take over when the producer, Hal B Wallis, became dissatisfied with Keighley. Curtiz made a number of films with Flynn including The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Flynn and co-star David Niven fell about laughing when Curtiz called for a horde of riderless horses to enter the scene. Curtiz yelled ‘bring on the empty horses’ which Niven later used as the title of his famous book about Hollywood.

The film picks up on all the elements of the Robin Hood legends, including Friar Tuck and the meeting with Little John. The highlight of the film comes towards the end when Robin and Sir Guy battle it out in an outstanding display of swordsmanship including a famous scene where the two move off camera and we see their shadows dancing along the castle walls.

The Adventures of Robin Hood was a wonderful film and probably the best film ever made about the hero of Sherwood Forest but there are a few other entertaining Robin Hoods.

In 1991 Kevin Costner appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. In this film Costner, as the noble Robin of Loxley, returns from the crusades to find that his father has been hung and his home laid to ruin by the Sheriff of Nottingham, played in a villainous but camp way by Alan Rickman, whose performance was universally praised. Robin was accompanied by Azeem, a Muslim who feels he has to repay Robin for saving his life. Costner as Robin, did not attempt to lose his American accent and although the film had mixed reviews, I personally have always enjoyed it.

The film featured the hit single Everything I Do, I Do it For You sung by Bryan Adams and also had a small cameo with Sean Connery playing King John. The exteriors were shot in the UK and one particular location was at Sycamore Gap, just by Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. The tree used in the sequence became known as the Robin Hood tree which featured in the news in 2023 when it was cut down by vandals.

A 2010 film version of Robin Hood was directed by Ridley Scott and starred Russell Crowe as Robin. Simply called Robin Hood, this film had a slightly different storyline with Crowe’s character masquerading as Robin of Loxley and was more serious in tone than the Flynn or Costner versions. During the crusades Robin Longstride comforts a dying Knight. Sir Robin Loxley asks him to return his sword to his father in England which he does. Loxley’s father asks him to continue to impersonate Robin to prevent the new King John seizing his lands. Cate Blanchett played the part of Marian and of course Robin soon brings his band of Merry Men together to fight the evil King John.

Perhaps I should also mention the Walt Disney animated version of Robin Hood that was released in 1973. The story is narrated by Alan-a-Dale who tells the story of Robin who as usual, robs from the rich to help the poor. The characters are all animals so Robin becomes a fox, Maid Marian a vixen, Little John is a bear and of course Richard the Lion Heart is a lion. The film was the first animated feature for the Disney Studios following the death of Walt Disney.

I should also mention that a few years ago I actually met Robin Hood. Well, the actor who played Robin in the 2006 BBC series, Jonas Armstrong who now lives in Lytham on the Fylde coast. I met him in the Victoria Hotel in St Annes.

All the films I have mentioned here recreate or at least try to recreate the legend of Robin Hood. All the original stories of folklore and legend are incorporated in the many Robin Hood films, from Robin and Little John meeting, to Robin’s love affair with Maid Marian. One story though that I still remember from that long lost Robin Hood book I used to have is one that I’ve never seen used in any Robin Hood film and it’s this. At the very end of Robin’s life, he is dying and he fires his bow and arrow one last time, asking to be buried wherever the arrow lands. He pulls back the bow and fires his last arrow which I’ve always thought was a fitting finale to the story of Robin Hood.

There are probably more films I could mention, Robin and Marian for instance starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as an aging Robin and Marian but I think that’s enough Robin Hood for now. Time for a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. Wonder what’s on the TV this afternoon?

As a great believer in synchronicity, I really wasn’t surprised to see a repeat of Robin of Sherwood, the 1980s TV series!

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Remembering James Dean

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for, yes, you’ve guessed it, books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s; Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about him.

James Dean had been killed in a car crash in 1955 and had only appeared in three films and at the time of his death, only one of those films had been released. I read a great deal about Dean when I was in my late teens and from what I could find out, the biography to read was written by his best friend, William Bast. I never managed to get a copy of that book back then but Bast produced a made for TV film version, James Dean: Portrait of a friend with Stephen McHattie as Dean.

As TV biopics go, Portrait of a Friend was pretty enjoyable but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it repeated on TV. I used to have a VHS recording of the film but when I looked recently I was unable to find it. Funnily enough, not long ago I was in one of those budget shops, it might have been Poundstretchers and I saw a copy of the film on DVD. It was a very poor version, in fact it looked as though it had been copied straight from an old VHS tape but even so, it was interesting to see it again.

Watching that DVD got me interested in Dean again and so I had a search through my book collection to see what books I had on the subject.

The paperback book I bought that day in the record shop in the 1970’s was probably James Dean: A Short Life by Venable Herndon. It wasn’t a great book but an interesting introduction to Dean and who he was. It detailed his struggle for acting roles, TV work in New York, his apartment at 19 West Sixty-Eighth Street, his three films, his doomed affair with Pier Angeli and of course his death.

A similar book although bigger and with more photographs was a biography by John Howlet. I couldn’t find that particular book although I’m certain I wouldn’t have given it away or thrown it out.

A slightly different book I bought back in the 1970’s was a Japanese book about Dean. I’m not sure of the title, there are some Japanese ideograms and the name in English, James Dean, on the back cover. There is little text inside the book, basically it’s just a picture album and I guess the Japanese read books from right to left as the book starts with his last film and then finishes with his first film.

My Japanese James Dean book.

James Dean by David Dalton was another purchase back in the 1970s. It’s a much more in depth look at Dean’s life and skimming through it I came across a few pages about Dean’s last day, Friday September 30th, 1955. The author presented a short timeline of that day starting from 8am when Dean picked up his silver Porsche from Competition Motors in Hollywood to 5.45pm when he was killed in a car accident.

James Dean was competing in a car race in Salinas and had decided to drive his competition car, the Porsche, to the event as the car was brand new and Dean wanted to get some miles on the clock.

As well as my books on the famous actor I also have a box set containing his three films.

East of Eden is based on the final part of the book by John Steinbeck. It’s about two brothers who compete for the love of their father. Dean played the ‘bad’ brother and the father was played by veteran actor Raymond Massey who was continually shocked by Dean’s bad language and sullen and moody demeanour.

Rebel Without a Cause is probably the most well known of Dean’s three films. Dean plays Jim Stark, a rebellious teenager who has been in trouble at school and has either been expelled or forced to leave. The film follows him on his first day at the new school as he attempts to make friends with a group of fellow classmates but the result is that he makes more enemies. He gets involved in a ‘chicken run’ with fellow classmate Buzz in which the two have to drive a stolen car towards a cliff edge and the last one to jump out is ‘chicken’. Buzz fails to exit his car and is killed.

It’s a great film even though James Dean looks far too old to be still going to school.

His final film was Giant based on a novel by Edna Ferber. The film is set in Texas and is about millionaire ranchers and cattlemen. Dean plays Jett Rink, a sullen ranch hand who unexpectedly inherits some land, finds oil there and suddenly becomes rich. After punching ranch owner Rock Hudson, Dean, covered in oil after striking oil, drives away as Chill Wills says, ‘you should have shot that fella a long time ago. Now he’s too rich to kill.’

Another book I picked up only recently was another picture album James Dean: Portrait of Cool edited by Leith Adams and Keith Burns. It’s an album of photographs found in the Warner Bros archive and some have not been published before. Included are all sorts of documents such as casting sheets, production notes and messages. Dean’s address is listed as 3908 West Olive Avenue which I think might have been a place he shared with Dick Davalos who played his brother in East of Eden. During Rebel Without a Cause, Dean was listed as living at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive.

1541 sunset Plaza Drive today from Google Maps.

Last Christmas Liz bought me one of my favourite presents, a copy of the Bill Bast memoir I mentioned earlier. Bill Bast shared apartments in both Hollywood and New York with Dean. In Hollywood, Bast became frustrated sharing a home with his friend. In the book, Bast accuses Dean of being untidy and moody and seemed to feel that he was subsidising Dean at one point as Bast was the only one with a job. After a dispute Bill decided to move to another apartment although the two remained friends. The book is written almost as if Dean was the love of Bast’s life and perhaps he was. In later life Bast wrote another memoir in which he claimed he and Dean had a gay relationship.

I’m not sure why someone like me, a council house boy from Northern England, should connect so closely with James Dean but back in the seventies the late star became one of my personal heroes. I remember going to a cinema on Oxford Road in Manchester to see back to back showings of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause on a very hot summer’s day. I bought a soundtrack album of those movies too, in the days before video and DVD.

Dean was a counterpoint to actors like Richard Burton; he mumbled and mispronounced things. I think that was what I liked about him; he was natural and imperfect. He had an image more rock star than 50’s actor. There was a great documentary about him made in the 70s and the music of the times, Bowie and Elton John featured heavily. Anyone remember that Eagles track ‘James Dean’?

Dean met his end on September 30th 1955 as he sped towards a race meeting in Salinas. He had already been stopped by the police and given a speeding ticket while driving his Porsche. In the passenger seat was his mechanic Rolf Weutherich and following behind was photographer Sandforth Roth and his friend Bill Hickman. They were towing the trailer on which the Porsche was originally mounted before Dean decided to drive.

As Dean approached the intersection of routes 466 and 41 in Chalome, a Ford station wagon turned across the path of the Porsche. “That guy up there’s gotta stop.” said Dean. The two cars collided. Rolf was thrown clear but James Dean was killed.

Today, years later, thousands of fans make pilgrimages every year to see Dean’s home in Fairmount, Indiana and to the intersection on highway 466 where he died. At his graveside in Fairmount fans chisel away bits of his gravestone for mementos and a bust of Dean by the sculptor Kenneth Kendall was ripped from its plinth. In 1977 a Japanese businessman named Seita Ohnishi had a chromium sculpture erected at the crash site on highway 466 in memory of Dean.

So why do people still hanker after James Dean all these years later? Well, I simply don’t know. As a young man I thought Dean was the epitome of cool and like many others I made him into my hero. Whilst doing some research about Jimmy Dean I came across this line on another site: “Some people are living lodestones. They get under the skin of people. You can’t explain why.” I can’t disagree.

Still, heroes come and heroes fade away. My heroes today are not the ones I used to love and worship thirty years ago. The thing is though, after writing this essay about Jimmy Dean I felt that I must find the time to look at some of his films again. Now where did I put that James Dean box set?

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Boy Meets Girl

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve watched quite a few films recently that come into the romcom category. It’s not my favourite genre but I thought I’d put together a short list of my favourite ones so here we go.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

I’d not seen this film for a while so it was great to see it pop up on my TV screen recently. I sometimes think of Four Weddings as a sort of modern Ealing Comedy, if Ealing were still making movies of course. There are a couple of elements that stop it from being perfect. One is the use of the F word. Why make a gentle comedy and then throw in a few gratuitous F words? I really don’t get it. The other thing is this, Hugh Grant plays a character who falls in love with a girl played by Andie McDowell. Andie McDowell, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t do it for me at all. She’s not, to me, that great looking and has a particularly irritating voice, all of which makes it a little difficult for me to identify with the Hugh Grant character, who, as I mentioned, has the hots for her.

In many ways I have a similar problem with the Steve Martin film LA Story. Steve’s character has the hots for a girl played by Victoria Tennant who is very pleasant, very nice but sadly, she doesn’t do it for me either. Happily, I can honestly say that in Casablanca I can fully identify with the Humphrey Bogart character, although whether I would have put Ingrid Bergman on the plane and stayed behind with Claude Rains, well that’s another matter.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is the movie that brought fame to writer Richard Curtis and actor Hugh Grant, as the announcer on Film 4 mentioned. Strangely, he didn’t mention Mike Newell, who directed the film. Funny how the credit from a successful film doesn’t always get spread equally around.

Notting Hill

It just so happens that this film, Notting Hill, was written once again by Richard Curtis. It’s not a movie classic, at least I used to think that but perhaps in its own way, a very minor way, perhaps it actually is. It’s a pleasant film to watch, it’s mildly amusing but it suffers, at least for me in that Julia Roberts, like Andie McDowell in the film above, just doesn’t really do it for me. Julia, in case you didn’t know is the love interest for Hugh Grant. Grant plays a young guy who owns a travel bookshop in London’s Notting Hill. One day in comes famous film star Julia. Grant gets involved with her, his middle class friends are suitably impressed and give advice when the love train comes off the rails. There are no car chases or shootings although now I come to think of it, there is a sort of car chase through the streets of London but it’s all a great deal of fun and right at the end the bookstore owner gets his film star girl.

You’ve Got Mail

This is a 1998 film based on the old James Stewart classic The Shop Around the Corner. Tom Hanks is Joe Fox who owns a massive discount book shop which is about to open just around the corner from Kathleen Kelly’s small bookstore The Shop Around the Corner. Meg Ryan plays Kathleen whose shop is a New York landmark but looks like going under when the big discount store opens. Joe and Kathleen meet but naturally they don’t like each other as it looks like Joe might put Kathleen out of business. Now it just so happens that Joe and Kathleen are internet penpals. They met on a chat site and only know each other from their chat line ‘handles’ so neither realises who the other actually is. Both are unhappy with their current partners and they decide to meet but Joe takes a peek at his date and realises it’s Kathleen.

Eventually Kathleen’s bookstore is forced to close down and she and Joe finally get it together.

Nora Ephron directed and wrote the script and the result is a really lovely film. Personally, I would have liked to see Billy Crystal in the Tom Hanks part but that’s just me. One last point, I wonder if younger viewers will understand the concept of ‘dial up’ internet?

His Girl Friday

They made rom-coms back in the old days too although this film from director Howard Hawks is probably more thought of as a screwball comedy as they used to call them back then. Cary Grant plays a newspaper editor and his top reporter and ex-wife Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, is about to get married. Cary Grant as ex-husband Walter Burns wants to cover one last story with Hildy but he is also determined to sabotage her marriage plans. He frames Hildy’s husband-to-be, Bruce, in a theft and later sets him up with counterfeit money.

Hildy wants to help Bruce but finds that the case she is working on is actually more interesting. Eventually Walter and Hildy agree to remarry on condition that they honeymoon in Niagara Falls but Walter realises there is a strike in Albany so they divert there to honeymoon and cover the story.

There is a lot of fast-moving witty dialogue in the film and the director encouraged the actors to improvise although according to Wikipedia, Russell had a ghostwriter beef up her lines so she could insert them when she and Cary were improvising. Director Hawks wanted to produce a film with the fastest dialogue ever and he certainly succeeded.

Love Story

I wrote a post a long time ago called Unseen TV and it was about films that I hadn’t seen on TV for many years. I wonder if some TV executive had actually read it because very soon afterwards all but one of those films had appeared on terrestrial TV. Love Story is one of those films that I could have included. I can’t even remember the last time it had a showing on British television.

Love Story is a 1970’s tearjerker about a couple who fall in love and get married. Ryan O’Neal plays the son of wealthy Ray Milland who does not approve of his son’s impending marriage and threatens to cut him off financially if the wedding goes ahead. The pair get married anyway and Jenny played by Ali McGraw tries to support her new husband Oliver played by O’Neal as he goes through law school. She gets a job as a teacher to pay Oliver’s tuition bills and he eventually graduates. They have trouble conceiving but after tests they find Jenny is terminally ill.

The tagline for the film, used in all the publicity was ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. Yes, it was sentimental but it was well acted and well put together and I hope some British TV channel happens to read this and finally shows it again.

Definitely Maybe

This is not a film I would normally have watched but Liz chose it and we both watched it together. I’ve got to say that I didn’t pay much attention during the first part but gradually I got really interested. It’s about a divorced guy called Will, played a little lamely by Ryan Reynolds who decides to tell his 9 year old daughter the story of his life, well his love life anyway. He tells the story of the three loves of his life but uses fake names so the child won’t realise which of the stories concerns her mother. Girl 1 cheats on him when he moves to New York. Girl 2 is a girl who runs the copier where they both work on Bill Clinton’s election campaign and girl 3 is a girl who is involved with an older guy when he meets her. The older guy is a famous writer played by Kevin Kline in a really rather good cameo part. As the story unfolds we see who Will is really fond of, who turns out to be his daughter’s mother and who he will eventually end up with. It turns out that one of the girls collects inscribed copies of Jane Eyre as she is looking for a copy inscribed by her late father that she had lost. Will eventually finds the copy in a bookstore and presents it to her.

The film was written and directed by Adam Brooks and the next time I see it shown on TV I will definitely pay attention to the film’s beginning. To sum up, the film is a load of sentimental tosh but having said that, I actually kind of liked it.

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Remembering Cary Grant

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve been a fan of Cary Grant for a very long time. I love his smooth and debonair style, his handsome and tanned good looks and that rather languid transatlantic brogue of his.

In the TV series Archie currently streaming on ITV X they seem to be saying that all of that was an invention, an invention by an Englishman called Archie Leach who transformed himself into a successful Hollywood film star named Cary Grant.

Grant was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904. He had a poor upbringing and his mother suffered from depression and his father was an alcoholic. The young Archie was interested in the theatre and performing and his mother was keen on him having piano lessons. His older brother had died before reaching the age of one and this perhaps made his mother a little over protective of the young Archie. Even so, his mother was not a woman who was able to give or receive love easily and the older Cary Grant blamed his childhood relationship with his mother for his problems with women in later life.

When Archie was 9 years old his father placed his mother in Glenside Hospital, a mental institution, telling his son that she had gone away on a long holiday and later, that she had died.

Archie befriended a group of acrobatic dancers known as The Penders and he was able to eventually join them and there he trained as a stilt walker and became part of their act. Later the group toured America and Archie decided to stay, following in the footsteps of others before him like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel who had made their way to the USA in an almost identical way.

On Wikipedia they mention that on the trip over to the USA Archie met Douglas Fairbanks and was greatly impressed by him, so much so that Fairbanks became a role model for the young Archie Leach.

In New York Archie worked in vaudeville with various comedy and theatrical groups. He joined the William Morris theatrical agency and began to pick up many theatre roles. In 1932 he had his first screen test and was given a five year contract with Paramount Pictures. B P Schulberg the general manager of Paramount decided that Archie Leach was not a good enough name for films so Archie came up with the name Cary Grant taking Cary from a stage character he had played and Grant chosen randomly from a telephone directory.

Cary Grant worked hard at his profession and in the TV series Archie they claim that Cary was a role or a part that Archie built up over time. Jason Isaacs who plays Grant says Cary would never be filmed or recorded during an interview because then he was being himself not playing at being Cary. The actor tracked down a recording of Grant made secretly by a student journalist who interviewed Cary over the phone and felt that for the first time he was hearing the real Archie who came over in the recording as very English rather than the usual mid Atlantic voice that we are used to hearing.

It seems to me that many stars who use a different name in the film world are in a way creating a character which they present to the public. You could argue that Marilyn Monroe was a similar personality and that she was a creation of Norma Jeane in the way that Cary Grant was created by Archie Leach.

A breakthrough role for Grant was starring with Mae West in the film She Done Him Wrong and the follow up, I’m No Angel. Grant went on to star in many famous films and amazingly, even though he was a star in Hollywood’s golden years, he was actually the first big star to not be a part of the studio system. He was a freelance actor, not contracted to any studio until 1937 when he signed a four-picture deal with Columbia.

In his early years in Hollywood, Grant shared a house with actor Randolph Scott leading to claims of the two being gay lovers. Still, young bachelors sharing a house with others is not uncommon. David Niven famously shared a house with Errol Flynn and we can hardly class those two as being gay.

Somewhere in my fairly huge book collection I have a biography of Cary Grant but despite an intensive search I couldn’t find it. I also have a copy of David Niven’s Bring on the Empty Horses which if I remember correctly has a short chapter on Grant. Now where did I put that book?

I did do some quite considerable research to produce this blog post. Firstly, I had to watch the four episodes of the TV series Archie, currently streaming on ITV X. That wasn’t anything difficult of course, it wasn’t a chore, in fact it was very enjoyable. Archie is a wonderful four part series and Jason Isaacs plays an outstanding part. He doesn’t try to impersonate Cary but he did manage to create a look of the late star and he caught Grant’s voice and enunciation perfectly. Most of the series follows Cary in later life when he becomes involved with and later marries Dyan Cannon, Dyan was his fourth wife and she was the mother of his only child Jennifer and she and her mother co-produced the series which is definitely well worth watching.

Next, I searched for the biography I had of Cary but despite searching the entire house I couldn’t find it. Oh well, I have a few copies of Bring on The Empty Horses about the house so I thought ok, I’ll grab that and have a read of the chapter on Cary. Once again, I searched through the entire house but could I find that book? No! Eventually I started to put everything back where I had found it and it was only after idly looking in a box of books that I had only recently packed away and had earlier dismissed, that I finally found it.

Anyway, I had a break from writing to look for that book and after a while when I couldn’t find it I popped the TV on. I wasn’t altogether surprised to find there was a Cary Grant film showing. It was An Affair to Remember, a love story in which Grant’s character, a playboy type meets Deborah Kerr on a transatlantic voyage and the two fall for each other. On arrival in the USA they decide to have a 6 month break from each other as they are both in other relationships and then meet at the top of the Empire State building in New York. It’s not really my cup of tea, in fact it’s overtly sentimental but then, sometimes a small dose of sentimentality is good for you. Cary Grant plays, well, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr plays a very English New Yorker.

I have two of Grant’s other films on DVD, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, both directed by Cary’s favourite director, Alfred Hitchcock.

OK, enough TV watching for now. Getting back to Bring on the Empty Horses, David Niven wrote about Cary Grant in a short section of his book called Long Shots and Close Ups where he gives his readers a quick sketch about various film people. The section on Cary is only three and a half pages and not the full chapter I was expecting but Niven clearly liked the man and in those three and a bit pages, picked up on some essential elements of Grant’s character. Niven remembers Cary Grant as an intelligent man, particularly with money and he listed people like multi millionaire Howard Hughes among his friends. Grant invested his earnings well and became one of the richest people in Hollywood. He had an obsession with his health, embarking on various health pursuits and then moving on to the next one. Niven remarks that once when Cary was taking swimming lessons to learn the crawl, Niven mentioned that Cary could already swim the crawl. Grant answered ‘yes but I want to swim the crawl perfectly!’ Cary gave up smoking by hypnotising himself and Niven also mentions his use of LSD during his treatment by a psychiatrist which is also brought up in Archie.

Cary Grant retired from films in 1966 the year his daughter was born and he and Dyan Cannon divorced in 1968. Many tried to bring him out of retirement for various films including his favourite director Alfred Hitchcock but he declined. He must have wanted to keep on working though because he did accept a position on the board of Fabergé.

He died in 1986 aged 82 and left behind an estate reputedly worth around 80 million dollars. Archie is a well made and quite fascinating piece of TV. Look out for it, it’s well worth watching.

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Captain My Captain

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This will be my 592nd post and as you can imagine I sometimes struggle for new ideas. Scrolling through the internet the other day I chanced on something about Robin Williams and the post mentioned the film Dead Poets Society. It isn’t one of my favourite films but if you’ve ever seen it you might remember the poem O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman which features a lot in the film. It got me thinking about Captains so I thought I might kick of this post with a few words about my favourite captain, James T Kirk.

Captain James T Kirk

The first series of Star Trek starred William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk. Forget Captain pointy head Picard, Kirk is a proper Captain and after a good twenty minutes of any episode he will usually have blasted a number of aliens with his phaser (a sort of ray gun) and done some pretty serious kissing of any beautiful girl, alien, android or otherwise, within a 100 yard area. Mr Spock was played by Leonard Nimoy. He is the ship’s science officer and as a Vulcan rarely displays emotion, logic being his primary motivation. Doctor McCoy played by DeForest Kelley is a doctor of the old school and he and Spock frequently get into verbal confrontations. Together they are the chief officers of the starship Enterprise on its five year mission to go where no man has gone before.

william_shatner

As a schoolboy I wrote to Desilu studios where I believed Star Trek was made, based on credits shown at the end of the show. After a while I received a set of glossy pictures of the show’s stars. They were all signed by the various actors, Shatner, Nimoy and so on but the signatures, I have long suspected, were made by a machine.

The original Star Trek, like many TV programmes of the sixties was shot on film and today it looks pretty sharp compared to shows from the 80’s that were shot straight to video. It was given a digital makeover a few years back with digital effects and new CGI spacecraft and is looking pretty good these days. Which was my favourite episode? Well I’d have to say it was the one that fans voted the best Star Trek episode ever; City on the Edge of Forever. The crew of the Enterprise arrive at a distant planet searching for the source of some time displacement. The source is a time portal, left among the ruins of an ancient civilisation which although abandoned, still emits waves of time displacement. In the meantime, Doctor McCoy is suffering from paranoia brought on by an accidental overdose of the wonder drug cordrazine which any Star Trek fan will tell you can cure any known Galactic ailment. McCoy in his crazed state bumbles through the time portal, back to 1930’s America (handy for that old 1930’s set on the Paramount back lot) and changes history. Kirk and Spock are forced to also go back in time, stop McCoy from changing history and restore things to the way they were. Joan Collins plays a charity worker at the core of events; does she have to die in order to restore normality?

What happened to Kirk? Well in the movie Generations, the character of Captain Kirk was sadly killed off. Generations which started off pretty well, combining the usual sci-fi elements of Star Trek with an intriguing mystery; who is the mysterious Soran and what is he up to? As it happened what he was up to wasn’t really that interesting, but the film marked the cinema handover from the original Star Trek cast to the new one. Pity really because as I mentioned above, I never really took to the Next Generation. However in the last two Star Trek films, the producers returned to the original characters, Kirk Spock, McCoy and Scott and with new actors playing the old characters, the story of Captain Kirk continues. As I write this William Shatner, who played the original Kirk is still active even though he is in his 90s. Wonder if they could get him to play Kirk one last time?

Captain Scott

Captain Scott planned to make an expedition to the north pole but then changed his mind and went for the south pole. At pretty much the same time Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, decided he also wanted to make the trip so a kind of race began. Who would get to the pole first? Amundsen decided to travel in classic fashion with teams of dogs pulling sledges. Scott decided he would use new mechanical devices, vehicles with caterpillar tracks, all of which broke down in the cold. Scott also used ponies but they were not acclimatised to the cold and fared poorly. Amundsen’s dogs turned out to be the best choice.

Why either of them would want to go to the pole is completely beyond me. All that they found there was a shed load of snow and ice which most people could have predicted anyway.

As we all know, Scott got beaten to the pole by Amundsen. The gallant British explorers then had to face the task of getting back to civilisation, however the weather worsened and the men froze to death in their tent.

You can watch the story of Captain Scott and his tragic expedition in the film Scott of The Antarctic. It is a sad film although John Mills as Scott plays a good part as usual and James Robertson Justice plays a serious role for a change, that of Captain Oates who disappears into the snow after telling his friends that he ‘might be some time.’ Oates perished like his friends but his courageous actions have never been forgotten.

Captain James Cook

Captain Cook was born in 1728 and died in 1779. He was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, who left behind a legacy of geographical and scientific knowledge.

He achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. His mapping of the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand changed the face of world geography. Before his famous three voyages to the Pacific and Australia, he also had made detailed maps of Newfoundland.

Cook was attacked and eventually killed by the natives in the Hawaiian Islands, during his attempt to kidnap the Hawaiian chief to reclaim the cutter stolen from one of his ships.

Captain Scarlet

Captain Scarlet was a TV puppet series made by producer Gerry Anderson in 1967. It was the first of Gerry’s puppet series to use puppets with realistic body proportions which although they looked more realistic were difficult for the puppeteers to manipulate. The idea for the series was that earth was under attack from the mysterious ‘Mysterons’, a race from the planet Mars that had been disturbed by the Zero X Mars exploration missions. The Mysterons have the power of ‘retrometabolism’, a way of reconstituting matter after an object or person has been destroyed. Captain Black has been recreated in this way and is under the control of the Mysterons. A similar thing happens to Scarlet but somehow he has broken free from Mysteron control. Scarlet is a member of Spectrum, an organisation set up to defend earth. All the agents have colour code names, hence captain Scarlet, voiced by Francis Matthews and Captain Blue, voiced by Ed Bishop.

A computer animated reboot was broadcast in 2005.

Captain Nemo

Nemo was a character in the Jules Verne novel 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. The novel was first published in 1870 and reappears in another of Vernes books, Mysterious Island written five years later. In the first book a French scientist has joined an expedition to find a sea monster. They ship is attacked by the monster and the biologist is surprised to find the monster is an advanced submarine. He and other members of the ships company are taken prisoner where they meet the mysterious captain Nemo. Not much is ever revealed about Nemo except that he seems bent on revenge after his homeland, wherever that was, was conquered by a powerful imperialist nation.

There have been numerous film versions but my personal favourite Nemo was played by actor James Mason.

Captain America

Captain America was a comic book hero first created in the 1940s. Steve Rogers is a frail man who volunteers to use a new serum which will rapidly boost his physical powers. He combats the nazi menace with his sidekick Bucky Barnes but an accident leaves him in a state of suspended animation until he is revived in the modern era and becomes the leader of the super-hero group The Avengers. I can’t say I was ever a great fan of the captain even in my younger comic reading days. Youngsters these days may know Captain America from the current wave of super hero films. Captain America: The First Avenger was released in 2011 starring Chris Evans as the eponymous hero.

Captain and Tennille

Captain and Tennille were a husband and wife recording duo who had most of their success in the 1970s. Daryl Dragon was known as the captain because of his habit of wearing a captain’s hat when he was the keyboard player for the Beach Boys. He and his wife Toni Tennille had a number of hits throughout the 1970s although the one I particularly remember was ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, a number one hit in the USA.

Captain Von Trapp

Never heard of captain Von Trapp? Well clearly you haven’t seen the Sound of Music. The story of the Von Trapp family of singers is actually a true story and Maria Von Trapp wrote a memoir about her experiences which was published in 1949. The book was made into a German film in 1956 and was so successful that a sequel was produced. Naturally Hollywood became interested but before that producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday secured the rights to make the story into a stage musical. They employed Rodgers and Hammerstein to write new songs as the German film had no original songs and just used Austrian folk songs. The musical was a huge hit and later became the famous hit film. Julie Andrews starred as Maria, the trainee nun who becomes a nanny to the Von Trapp children. Their father, Captain Von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer eventually falls for Maria and the family manage to escape from Austria just as the Nazis take hold of the country.

I’m not a great fan of musicals but I do love The Sound of Music.

Captain My Captain

O Captain My captain is a poem by Walt Whitman about the death of Abraham Lincoln. As I mentioned earlier it is perhaps most famous for being used in the film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams as an unconventional teacher.

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The Godfather: The Film of the Book or the Book of the Film

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve written a few of these ‘book or the film’ posts but in this one I’m going to stick with one particular film and book; The Godfather.

The Book

I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.

Don Corleone is a Sicilian and apparently no Sicilian can refuse a request on the day of his daughter’s wedding. One of those with a request for the don is singer Johnny Fontane whose show business career is waning. He feels that a part in a new film will revitalise it but the producer will not cast him. The don is happy to help out his favourite godson and dispatches his advisor and stepson Tom Hagen to Hollywood to sort things out.

Another supplicant is a funeral director. Two youths have attacked and beaten his daughter and because of political connections the courts of law have only handed down suspended sentences. The father asks for Don Corleone to give him revenge but the Don declines. The funeral director has never shown the correct respect to the Don but when he does and finally calls him Godfather then, and only then, does Corleone issue orders for the youths to be brutally beaten.

Some time afterwards the Don agrees to meet fellow mafioso Sollozo who wants Corleone’s help with a drug smuggling operation. The Don declines and this sets off a violent war between the mafia gangs.

The Film

Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.

Paramount also wanted to shoot the film on their back lot but Coppola persuaded them to shoot on location in New York and stick to the original time frame of the book which was set in the 1930s and 40s.

Various people were auditioned for parts in The Godfather but finally the cast was resolved and shooting began with Brando as the Don, James Caan as Sonny, Al Pacino as Michael, Robert Duvall as Tom and Diane Keaton as Kay Adams.

The Book

The book is a fairly heft one and there is much in there that is not covered by the film. Johnny Fontane for instance features more in the book, while he plays only a supporting role in the film. There is a further story in the book about Lucy, a friend of Sonny’s wife with whom he is having an affair. After Sonny’s death Lucy feels she will never find not only love but sexual pleasure ever again. The reason for this is that Sonny had a rather large penis and Lucy’s corresponding anatomy is rather large, however she falls for a doctor who sorts her out with an operation which restores the anatomical status quo.

Going back to the Johnny Fontane character, there have been various stories and rumours which imply the character was based on Frank Sinatra. Like Johnny Fontane, Frank was tied to a lifetime contract with a bandleader, in this case Tommy Dorsey but Dorsey somehow relented and released Sinatra. Some say mobster Willie Moretti was instrumental in helping Sinatra free himself from the contract. Later when things weren’t going so good for Sinatra, he revived his career by appearing in the hit film From Here to Eternity for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar. In the book, Johnny Fontane is after a similar film part but the producer declines to give it to him. At the wedding of Corleone’s daughter, Fontane asks for the Don’s help, cue the famous scene where producer Jack Woltz finds his favourite racehorse’s head in his bed.

The Film

Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.

Sinatra always denied any involvement with the mafia although he did sing at the wedding of mafia boss Willie Moretti’s daughter, just like Johnny Fontane did at the Corleone wedding that opens the film. Anthony Summers, in his book about Sinatra, claims that the story was true and mafia enforcer Johnny Blue Eyes put pressure on studio boss Harry Cohn to give Sinatra the film role that rebooted his career.

Director Fred Zinnemann thought Sinatra might be good in the role so Cohn was happy to go along with the idea.

The Book

As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.

The Godfather Parts II and III

In part II there are two parallel stories. One is the story of Vito Andolini, as described above, played by Robert De Niro and another follows on from the first film. Michael is now the head of the family and gets involved with gangster Hyman Roth with investments in Cuban casinos. After the Cuban revolution Michael realises Roth is out to kill him and so has him murdered. A senate investigation looks into Michael’s activities with information provided by Frank Pentangeli, a former member of his organisation, but Michael brings pressure to bear on the informant and the investigation collapses.

In The Godfather Part III Michael’s story continues. He is reconciled with his sister after the murder of her husband in the original film. He also gets involved in a scheme in Europe where he hopes to become fully legitimate but other mafia bosses have different ideas. The Papal bank scandal and the death of Pope John Paul I are real events that are also thrown into the mix. The film was the weak element in the Godfather trilogy. In 2020 The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone was released. It was just a re-edited version of part III and personally I still didn’t find it anywhere near as good as the other two films.

Marlon Brando worked with Coppola again on the film Apocalypse Now. He played the part of an American Colonel in Vietnam who has apparently gone insane and Martin Sheen is sent to assassinate him. Brando turned up on set hugely overweight and not knowing his lines. He then decided to re write or improvise most of his scenes and the director was forced to shoot Brando in shadow due to his weight. Basically, he pulled all the stunts that Paramount expected of him in The Godfather. Not the best way to repay a director who had resurrected his career with the role of Don Corleone.

In 1990, Brando appeared in the comedy film, The Freshman, playing a parody of Don Corleone. When the shooting over ran, Brando demanded a million dollars to film for an extra week. The producers declined to pay and Brando threatened to badmouth the film to the press. Eventually they paid.

Brando died in 2004.

In 2023 Coppola finished filming his latest project, Megalopolis, a sci fi film about the rebuilding of New York after a major disaster.

Conclusion.

I enjoyed the Mario Puzo novel and I did re-read it for this post but it seems to stray into areas which really have no relevance to the main narrative which I found slightly annoying. The film version, which I also watched recently is a modern classic which continues to entertain everytime I see it. I like both the book and the film but I’d have to say I think the film version has the edge.

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7 Directors Who Acted in Their Own Films

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I thought I’d try to write or at least start this post off by writing from memory without using Google. I could only come up with 6 directors so I added another who acted but not in his own films. I decided to exclude actor/directors like Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood but then I broke that rule by adding Orson Welles. Now that the parameters are clear for this post, well fairly clear, let’s get going . . .

Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock was a British director who began in the days of silent films and came to be known as the master of suspense. Blackmail made in 1929 was the first British Talkie and 10 years later producer David O Selznick lured him to Hollywood where he made many films that are now regarded as classics, films like North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, The Birds and Pyscho. Hitchcock might also be seen as one of the first celebrity directors. He became popular because of his habit of appearing, however briefly, in all of his films, sitting on a bus for instance, just missing the bus in another. He also became well known by introducing his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He is probably the most famous director to appear in his own films. He never played a speaking role but he appeared in every one of his films in some small way.

Hitchcock was knighted in 1980 and died in March that same year.

Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino is an interesting filmmaker in many ways, writing and acting as well as directing. His films also seem to follow an unconventional path with many extended scenes and dialogue to fill in character background. I haven’t seen many of his films but Pulp Fiction from 1994 is one of my favourites and it involves a number of overlapping storylines. Tarantino plays the part of Jimmie, a friend of two gangsters played by John Travolta and Samuel Jackson. Travolta’s character accidentally shoots someone in the back of their car and the two turn to Jimmie for help who then calls another gangster played by Harvey Keitel who sorts out the situation.

Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is one of my very favourite filmmakers, responsible for directing such films as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and JFK. In Wall Street Stone takes a close look at the American stock market and the world of stocks, shares and stockbroking. A young ambitious trader dreams of working with big time corporate trader Gordon Gekko,

The young ambitious trader is Bud Fox played by Charlie Sheen and he manages to wangle himself into the world of the high flying Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas who won an Oscar for his portrayal. The two find that rival stockbroker Sir Lawrence Wildman is buying Anacot Steel and they buy shares and then leak information to the press which drives up the price. In a montage of shots, Oliver Stone himself appears as an investor who is buying shares.

Stone also had a cameo in the film Dave in 1993 in which the President of the USA has a stroke and an impersonator takes over until the President is well enough to return. Stone plays himself as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ claiming that the President has been replaced by a doppelganger.

Martin Scorcese

Scorcese is one of the great filmmakers of all time having directed numerous classic films such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Aviator and many others. In Taxi Driver, Scorcese follows a disturbed former Vietnam veteran called Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro. Bickle works nights in New York City as a taxi driver and as he drives around we hear his voice on the soundtrack lamenting the moral decay of the city and his desire to rid the streets of the scum that he sees nightly. Later he plans to assassinate a political candidate but eventually shoots the pimp of a young girl. Wounded by the pimp, he falls into a coma but awakens to find he has become a hero to people in the city.

In one scene, Scorcese plays a passenger in Bickle’s cab who asks to stop below an apartment where his wife is apparently involved with another man.

Martin Scorcese continues to make films and his latest release in 2023 is Killers of the Flower Moon.

John Huston

Born in 1906, John was the son of the Walter Huston and his wife Rhea. Walter was an actor and Rhea a sports editor for various magazines. His parents divorced when he was young but Huston spent time with both his parents. He wrote stories for various magazines and decided to try his hand with the new film business starting up in Hollywood. Huston had a contract with Universal, his father’s studio, and wrote dialogue for various films but after a drunken incident driving a car which left an actress dead he left to live in Paris. Later he returned and began writing for Warner Bros with great success. After the hit film Sergeant York starring Gary Cooper for which he wrote the screenplay, he managed to convince the film company to let him direct a picture. Huston chose The Maltese Falcon and the result was an absolute classic film starring Humphrey Bogart.

In 1948 Huston directed The Treasure of The Sierra Madre. He adapted the book by B Traven for his own screenplay and also cast his father, Walter Huston, as the old time prospector who takes two others, Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt, on a search for gold.

In the opening scenes Bogart is down on his luck in the Mexican town of Tampico and approaches a smartly dressed American asking ‘could you stake a fellow American to a meal?’

Later Bogart, as Fred C Dobbs, approaches the same man again until the man asks ‘can’t you occasionally go to someone else?’ The smart American was played by Huston himself.

Huston had various other roles as an actor, one I remember was in the 1960’s spoof version of Casino Royale. Various directors contributed to the chaotic film including Huston. He was to shoot a segment about M, the head of the Secret Service but Robert Morley was unable to play the part so Huston played it himself.

Huston directed numerous films but died in 1987 aged 81.

Orson Welles

Primarily Welles was known as an actor but he directed many films, including his very first one, Citizen Kane which has become known as one of the greatest films of all time. Welles was known for having one of the most incredible contracts in Hollywood history, not in terms of money but for the creative control that Welles had. In Citizen Kane the film opens with the death of Kane, a millionaire newspaper magnate. His last words were ‘Rosebud’. The makers of a cinema newsreel decide to find out what or who Rosebud was.

To do so they research Kane’s life; his inheritance of a huge fortune, his takeover of a newspaper, his great wealth, his power and influence, his marriage and divorce and ultimately his death. The reporters never find the answers to their questions but we, the cinema audience, have the secret revealed to us right at the end of the picture.

Citizen Kane is a wonderful piece of cinema with an outstanding visual style and the only criticism I can put forward is that for all its visual fireworks it is a film with a cold centre, a cold heart. Does the viewer feel sympathy for Kane? I’m not sure he does.

Welles went on to make many films but never again achieved the directorial success he had with Kane. He died on the morning of October 10th, 1985 from a heart attack. He left behind numerous unfinished films and screenplays.

Cecil B DeMille

Cecil was born in 1881 and is known as one of the founding fathers of American cinema. He was famous as a director of epics from the silent Ten Commandments in 1923 to Samson and Delilah and another version of The Ten Commandments, this time with sound and shot in colour in 1956.

DeMille actually appeared in many cameos doing prologues or trailers but in 1950 he starred as himself in Sunset Boulevard directed by Billy Wilder. In the film, retired silent star Norma Desmond wants to return to the screen. She has written a screenplay which she has asked Joe Gillis, a writer desperate for some income, to edit. The script is terrible but after a phone call from the studio, Desmond arrives at the Paramount lot to see DeMille. DeMille finds that the phone call was actually a request to hire her grand old car for use in a film and not, as Norma thought, a call for her to return to films.

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Funerals, Marilyn and what to do with those VHS Tapes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I went to another funeral this week. It was someone I knew only very slightly and in fact Liz knew the deceased much more than me. His name was John and he was a pretty nice guy. The funeral service though seemed to me to be a little bit flat, a little lacking in soul. There was no priest or reverend at the service, just the celebrant. She read out a history of John’s life and family, someone came up to read a sad poem and his Grandson played a tune on his guitar.

The big problem though was the heat. Despite hearing for most of the year that a heatwave was coming this summer, most of the time we in the UK have suffered weeks of bad weather. The day of the funeral though turned out to be the hottest for a long time. Sweat poured down my face in the crematorium and when the service was over I had to make a quick exit as I had a doctor’s appointment to get to. It was wonderful to sit down in the air-conditioned surgery and cool down.

Afterwards we drove back to the wake but the venue that had been chosen was a hotel just by the seafront and the sun had brought out the crowds and parking was impossible, well, almost impossible. Luckily a small school next door was good enough to open its gates to the mourners otherwise I could never have parked at all.

At the wake I knew no one except the widow but everyone I did speak to said the same thing, wasn’t it a lovely service? Actually, I didn’t think it was although I would never have said that. Was it because there was no priest or vicar? Did the tributes fall flat because no one there had any faith in anything except the finality of death?

Funerals are odd things; in a way they are not for the dead but for the living, those left behind after a loved one has died and I have to say, not only did I enjoy my mother’s funeral, although enjoy is not perhaps the right word, but it helped me more than anything to say goodbye to her.

Something else that made me think about death this week was reading a blog on Medium.com from an American writer. He had read that in the state where he lives, and I can’t remember which one it was in the USA, he had read that the average life expectancy for a male was 77 years. He was 57 and so he reckoned that on average, he had about 20 years left. 20 years sounds a lot but when it comes down to it, it really isn’t that much at all and if the same thing is true for me, a male living in the north west of England, then I’ve only got about 11 years left.

This week as I write this, is the 61st anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I wrote about Marilyn a while ago talking about my collection of books about Marilyn and the clippings in my scrapbook. Over on Twitter and Instagram, pictures and clips of Marilyn are still pretty plentiful despite her dying back in 1962. One post I saw on Instagram paid tribute to her memory but at the same time the author decided to take a poke at those who believe Marilyn was murdered by the Kennedy family.

I have to say I don’t believe that, not for a minute, but at the same time I don’t believe Marilyn committed suicide either. I mentioned that on the Instagram post and the author told me there were no credible witnesses regarding her involvement with the Kennedys. Not so I replied, there was Marilyn’s housekeeper and handyman, there was Marilyn’s neighbour, there was Marilyn’s friend Jeanne Camen and of course there was Marilyn’s psychiatrist Ralph Greenson who when pressed about Marilyn’s death answered ‘ask Bobby Kennedy.’

Other people jumped into the argument too, some supported me and some didn’t. Jeanne Carmen was a liar said one, so was Bob Slatzer who has not only claimed Marilyn had been murdered but also that he was actually married to Marilyn for a short time. The studio forced the couple to annul the wedding or so he says. The problem there is that there are no records of the supposed wedding and the dates Slatzer gave were dates when Marilyn was known to be somewhere else.

Walt Schaefer, the head of the Schaefer ambulance company that sent an ambulance to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Marilyn’s home, says Marilyn was alive when the ambulance arrived but she died on the way to hospital. How did her body then get back to her home where it was supposedly discovered by housekeeper Eunise Murray later that night?

Here’s another thing: in 1985 a former employee of the ambulance company came forward to say that he was part of the ambulance crew that night. James Hall says Marilyn was found in the guest cottage but CPR was applied and she began to revive, her colour going from blue to normal. A doctor then appeared; he gave Marilyn an injection into the heart which missed and cracked a rib but she then died.

Hall has passed numerous lie detector tests but like many of the stories of Marilyn’s last hours, his story has never been corroborated and no broken rib was reported by the coroner, Thomas Noguchi.

Did Bobby Kennedy visit Marilyn on her last day alive? Yes, as I said earlier there were eyewitnesses to his visit. Did he murder Marilyn? Of course not but whatever happened, Marilyn did not survive that night.

You might be thinking that perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the death of a film star who died 61 years ago and actually, you might have a point. The more I read about Monroe and her death the more I want to know the truth but it seems to me that Monroe fans are split on the subject of her death. There are those who think Marilyn took an overdose and there are those who think something sinister involving the Kennedys happened. It’s a little bit like the JFK assassination; some think Oswald did it, some think that something happened involving the CIA, the Mafia, J Edgar Hoover, Cuban exiles or a combination of all those.

There’s a great scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall where Woody tries to explain just how all those differing theories and ideas can get on top of you and perhaps it’s time to put my Marilyn murder books away for a while and read something else and watch some different documentaries.

These last few days I’ve spent trying to sort out my huge collection of VHS video tapes. Any films that are likely to be shown again on TV or that I can now buy on DVD I tend to just throw away. Some that are proper commercial recordings I’ve taken to the charity shop but I’ve still got a shed load of tapes of F1 events, TV shows and documentaries. What I’ve tried to do with those is to copy them to DVD as I just happen to have a VHS/DVD recorder combo. One of the videos I found was the 1985 documentary Say Goodbye to the President which was of course about Marilyn Monroe, her involvement with the Kennedys and her last days. It’s a bit sad but films get reshown time and time again but TV documentaries rarely get a second showing.

A few weeks ago I was writing a post about stars who have appeared in Columbo and I knew I had a video of Jane Greer talking about her experiences with Howard Hughes. Could I find it after searching through my cupboards and boxes of VHS tapes? No, of course not. This week when I thought I would carry on with my mission to copy a few more interesting VHS documentaries to DVD, I opened a box and there was the video I’d been looking for. It was a tape marked ‘The RKO Story, the Howard Hughes Era.’ It was an episode from a 1980’s BBC documentary series about RKO Studios which were for a short period owned by Howard Hughes. Jane Greer was finally free of her contract to Hughes and had been signed to RKO and then Hughes bought the studio. I’m not sure if he bought it just to get control of Jane Greer but of course that is what happened.

Hughes told Jane how he knew she wasn’t happy; she told him she was. He wanted to buy her a house; she told him she already had a house and by the way, also a husband and child living there. Hughes was undeterred. He wouldn’t put her in any pictures unless she left her husband which she wasn’t ready to do so he kept paying her wages according to her contract and she just went home, cashed her pay cheque and got on with her life. Her film career of course stalled fatally.

A number of others told a similar story, Janet Leigh was one, another was Jane Russell. Jane had encountered a lot of racy publicity due to the film The Outlaw but as she pointed out, the sexy publicity pictures and film posters were really not representative of how she actually appeared in the film.

The film censors of the day wouldn’t allow the film to be released and Hughes used the ensuing battle with the censors to promote the film. He famously designed a bra for Jane to wear in the film which was intended to look as if Jane didn’t have a bra on at all. Jane Russell refused to wear it, padded her own bra with tissues and Hughes was apparently none the wiser. The film was finally released years after it was made, did very well and was even re-released when Hughes took over RKO.

As I said earlier, any film I have on VHS is not really worth saving as most are easy to find on DVD or on TV but I do have a few that I have rarely seen on the small screen in recent years. One of my absolute favourites is Random Harvest starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. I love that film. It’s a bit soppy and sentimental and always brings a tear to my eye at the end. It was written by one of my favourite authors too, James Hilton, who came from Leigh in Lancashire, now part of Greater Manchester. I haven’t seen it on TV since I recorded it on VHS back in the 1980’s. Is it worth copying to DVD? Of course it is, in fact I think it’s time to make a brew, get out the biscuits and the tissues and settle down for a watch.

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A Tale of 4 Ships

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started this post by looking at an old one, a post about famous Pilots. That inspired me to make a sort of seagoing version. I started thinking about famous captains but I was struggling to think of any so I went with famous ships. Perhaps I could have stuck with captains after all; Captain Kirk, Captain Ahab, Captain and the Tenille and so on. Oh well, I think I’ll save that for another time so here we go with famous ships.

Victory

I should think that almost everyone reading this will know that HMS Victory was Nelson’s flagship at the battle of Trafalgar. The ship was one of 12 that had been ordered by the British government in 1758. The hull was laid down in 1759 and finally launched in 1765. 6,000 trees were used in the construction and 6 foot copper bolts were used to hold the construction together as well as treenails or dowels used to secure lesser elements of the ship. Once the frame was completed it was usual to let the wood dry out or ‘season’ before fitting the ship out further. Due to the end of the Seven Years’ War, the hull was left to dry for three years and the ship was finally launched in May of 1765.

By Ballista – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=749934

The ship had various adventures with the Royal Navy before becoming Admiral Nelson’s flagship in the battle of Trafalgar.

On the 21st of October, 1805, the Victory and the British Fleet began battle with the French. The British ultimately won but a sniper on the French ship Redoutable fired at Nelson hitting him with a musket ball which fatally wounded him. The musket ball was later recovered by the Victory’s surgeon William Beatty and he later had it mounted into a locket which he wore for the rest of his life. On Beatty’s death, the locket was presented to Queen Victoria.

The Victory was badly damaged in the battle and had to be towed back to England. It was repaired but was no longer a first rate ship and was relegated to various duties, even becoming a prison ship at one point. The Admiralty decided to break up the Victory and use her timbers and fittings in other ships. The public outcry was so great that the Admiralty hesitated to go ahead.

To a great extent the ship was abandoned to rot away and in 1922, the ship was found to be in such a state of disrepair that it was moved into a dry dock at Portsmouth, actually dock no 2, the oldest dry dock in the world. Restoration began after an appeal to the public for funding and dock number 2 became the Victory’s permanent home.

Bismarck

Bismarck was the first of two battleships built for Nazi Germany’s navy. Named after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the ship was laid down at shipyards in Hamburg in July 1936 and launched in February 1939. Final construction work was completed in August 1940, when she was commissioned into the German fleet. Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz were the largest battleships ever built by Germany.

In May 1941 the Bismarck planned to enter the shipping lanes of the Atlantic and attack convoys bringing much needed supplies into Britain. The Bismarck in company with the Prinz Eugen was engaged by the HMS Hood and the Prince of Wales. The Hood was destroyed in the battle while the Prince of Wales was badly damaged and forced to retreat.

The British began a relentless pursuit of the German vessel and two days later she was severely damaged by torpedoes fired by aircraft from the HMS Ark Royal. The rudder had been damaged on the Bismarck and the ship was forced to steam in a wide circle. The battleship came under further attack from the British ships and a major hit on the Bismarck’s bridge killed or disabled Captain Lindemann and Admiral Günther Lütjens. The remaining executive officer ordered the crew to abandon and scuttle the Bismarck in order to prevent the British capturing and boarding the vessel which eventually capsized and sunk.

The entire episode was made into a film in 1960 called Sink the Bismarck. Kenneth More starred as the head of the underground naval operations war room and he and his staff coordinate the hunt for the Bismarck.

Bounty

Another famous seagoing story that has been made into a feature film, several films in fact, is the story of the mutiny on the Bounty. The mutiny occurred in April 1789 and was led by Fletcher Christian who was an acting Lieutenant on board the Bounty. The Bounty’s mission was to sail to Tahiti and collect breadfruits and then deliver them to the West Indies. It may have been that a five month layover on Tahiti, where many of the men formed relationships with the native women, was at the heart of the mutiny. William Bligh, the captain of the Bounty, had at one point been a great admirer of Fletcher Christian, even promoting him to the rank of acting second lieutenant and thereby becoming his second in command. The relationship soured later though and when the ship began the journey home Christian decided to stage a mutiny. Bligh and his supporters were made to leave the ship on the Bounty’s launch, a 23 foot boat and were given food and water for 5 days. Bligh sailed to a nearby island for supplies and then made an astonishing journey in the small boat to Timor where the authorities were alerted to the mutiny.

The mutineers fled in the Bounty and returned to Tahiti but Christian realised that this would be the first place the navy would come to search for them. Sixteen crew members opted to stay on Tahiti, Christian and the rest of the mutineers together with a contingent of Tahitans then tried to settle on another island but the natives there were unfriendly and the Bounty left in search of another island. The mutineers then came across Pitcairn Island and seeing that it was marked incorrectly on naval charts decided to settle there. Numerous disagreements arose later with the Tahitans as many of the British considered them as slaves. Fletcher Christian was later murdered on the island although he was survived by a son and other children.

Today, the descendants of the mutineers still live on the island.

Various film versions of the story were made but the most famous featured Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. In the 1960’s a version was made with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. Brando was so taken with Tahiti where numerous scenes were shot, he made it his home for many years. Another version, The Bounty appeared in 1984. It was a project originally started by director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt but after various disagreements with the producer, Lean backed out and the New Zealand director Roger Donaldson took over.

Titanic

The story of the Titanic is one that has captured the imagination of many over the years and even today seems to be still in the news after a deep diving mini submersible was crushed in the depths of the ocean while taking sightseers to view the wreck of the great ship.

The ship was the largest afloat and was designed to be the epitome of luxury. It was known as the ‘unsinkable’ ship and made its maiden voyage in 1912 from Southampton to New York in the USA. On the voyage the ship struck an iceberg and the hull was ruptured. The Titanic sank with a great loss of life. A major flaw however was that there were not enough lifeboats for the crew and passengers in the event of a tragedy. Another was that the 16 watertight compartments were not truly watertight and when the first one filled with water, the water then spilled over into the next one and so on until the ship sunk.

Numerous films and TV shows have been made about the sinking. Kenneth More starred in A Night To Remember, a 1958 British film about the Titanic. In the 1960’s the first episode of the time travel TV show The Time Tunnel featured a story about two American scientists who are transported back in time and arrive on board the doomed ship. A more recent film blockbuster was the 1997 Titanic directed by James Cameron. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet star in the film that weaves a tragic love story with the fate of the famous ship. Titanic was the most expensive film ever made at the time with a budget of 200 million dollars. A huge reconstruction of the ship was made in Rosarito, Mexico and was built on a lifting platform which was able to tip the ship to simulate the sinking. The film was a great success winning 11 Oscars including one for Best Picture.

Personally I rather like Raise The Titanic, a 1980 British film version produced by Lew Grade and his ITC Entertainment company and based on the novel by Clive Cussler

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The Forgotten Stars of Columbo

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Famous faces who have appeared in the classic detective series.

If you happen to be a big fan of murder mysteries then Sunday is a great day for you. Over on 5 USA on UK Freeview TV you can watch the classic detective series Columbo to your heart’s content.

Columbo first appeared in the early 1970s as part of the Mystery Movie TV series. Each week followed a different detective trying to track down a murder case, sometimes it was MacMillan and Wife and other weeks McCloud, Banacek or various others. The most popular one by far though was Columbo.

Columbo was a homicide detective for the LAPD and he was played by Peter Falk although the role was originally written for Bing Crosby. Crosby however thought a regular TV slot would interfere too much with his golf so he turned down the role, went back to the fairway and the part went to Peter Falk who made it his own.

If you ever see the original pilot, shot in 1968, you can see how Crosby might have fitted into the part as Falk plays Columbo in a very Crosby like laid back way. The very first guest murderer was Gene Barry who was familiar to TV audiences after playing Amos Burke in Burke’s Law for many years. He also starred in a 1953 film version of War of the Worlds.

The pilot episode also introduced audiences to a particular feature of Columbo in that we see who the murderer is and how he commits the crime first. Then we see lieutenant Columbo gradually solve the clues and get his man, or woman.

Columbo appears to be bumbling along chewing on his cigars and eating chilli but we soon realise that behind this façade and his famous raincoat, is a very shrewd detective.

Roddy McDowell and Ida Lupino

Short Fuse is one of my very favourite episodes and two famous stars make guest appearances. The guest murderer is Roddy MacDowell. Roddy became a child star in the 1940’s appearing in films like How Green Was My Valley and Lassie Come Home. He also played Cornelius in the Planet of The Apes films and in the subsequent TV series. Although he appeared in many films, he also appeared in a huge number of TV series and stage productions. He died in 1998 aged 70.

In the same episode, Ida Lupino plays murderer Roddy McDowell’s aunt, unable to believe that Roddy was the murderer of her husband. She appeared in another episode too, Swan Song, in which she gets bumped off by guest murderer Johnny Cash.

Ida Lupino, like Roddy MacDowell, was born in England, in fact both lived in the Herne Hill area of London. She wanted to be a writer rather than an actress but went into acting as she was part of a theatrical family and it seems that becoming an actor was expected of her. She appeared in many British films before moving to the USA in 1933.

She wasn’t content to just act in films and was very critical of the parts she was offered, being suspended numerous times by Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers. She and her husband Collier Young formed a production company called The Filmmakers Inc in 1948. The company produced twelve films, six of which Lupino directed and five of which she wrote or co-wrote. The company closed its doors in 1955 and Lupino began directing for TV. She was one of the very first Hollywood TV and Film directors and was the only woman ever to direct an episode of The Twilight Zone. Ida Lupino died in 1995 aged 77.

Ray Milland

Milland was another British actor who found fame in Hollywood. Milland was born in Wales and served with the British Army. When his army career finished, Milland decided to become an actor. He appeared in several British films before moving to Hollywood in 1929. He worked as a stock actor for MGM then moved to Paramount in 1930. His first lead role was in The Jungle Princess in 1930 with Dorothy Lamour.

He appeared in numerous films but never thought of himself as a serious actor. A great success for him was The Lost Weekend in which he played an alcoholic. The film was directed by Billy Wilder and Milland did a great deal of research for the role and won the Oscar for that year’s best actor, which led to his contract with Paramount being rewritten and making him Paramount’s highest paid actor.

In 1954 he worked for Alfred Hitchcock on Dial M for Murder. Milland decided to retire from acting at one point but soon found he was bored and returned to Hollywood. In 1963 he made the sci-fi film The Man with X Ray Eyes. He appeared in many TV series including of course Columbo.

He was the guest murderer in The Greenhouse Jungle where he plays a man who stages a fake kidnapping of his nephew and then bumps him off to keep the ransom money. In another, Death Lends a Hand, his wife is killed by Robert Culp, one of my favourite Columbo murderers and a classic episode.

Milland died of lung cancer in 1986.

Janet Leigh and John Payne

In 1975 Janet Leigh and John Payne both starred in the episode Forgotten Lady. Both had been stars in a bygone era. Janet Leigh was born in 1927 and made her film debut in 1947. Two notable successes were The Naked Spur and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. She appeared with her husband Tony Curtis in Houdini in which Curtis played Harry Houdini.

Another great success for Janet and possibly the film she is most remembered for was the Hitchcock film Pyscho in 1960 however, according to Wikipedia, she was so traumatised after seeing her shower death scene that she avoided showers for the rest of her life.

Clips from one of her films Walking my Baby Back Home, were used in the Columbo episode. She appeared with her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis in the supernatural horror film The Fog in 1980. Jamie Lee Curtis also had a small role as a waitress in the Columbo episode The Bye Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case.

Janet Leigh died aged 77 in 2004

John Payne appeared in many film noir crime films as well as many 20th Century Fox musicals, his most famous film being Miracle on 34th Street. His final role came in the Columbo episode Forgotten Lady. He died, also aged 77 in 1989.

Myrna Loy

Myrna Loy appeared in the 1972 episode Etude in Black starring guest murderer John Cassavettes. She was born in 1905 in Montana and was the daughter of a Montana rancher. Her father was also a real estate developer and her mother encouraged him to buy land in Hollywood. Some of the land he sold to Charlie Chaplin who built his studio on the plot. The Loy family made a considerable profit on the deal. Myrna’s father took his family back to Montana but when he passed away his widow returned the family to Hollywood.

Myrna studied dance in Los Angeles. She had small parts in many silent pictures but some stills of her appeared in Motion Picture magazine and led to a contract with Warner Bros.

A big success came in 1934 when she appeared in the film The Thin Man with co-star William Powell. The two proved to be a popular screen couple and appeared in 14 films together.

In the late thirties she became one of Hollywood’s busiest and most highly paid actresses but in the 1940s she devoted all her energies to war work and the Red Cross. She was busy throughout the 1950s but in the late 60s began working more in television.

She died in 1993 aged 88.

Jane Greer

Jane Greer was apparently best known for her role as Kathie Moffat in the 1947 film noir Out of the Past. It’s not a film I’ve seen but it does sound like one to look out for. Jane was a beauty contest winner and model and was spotted by Howard Hughes in an edition of Life magazine when she was 18. Hughes became obsessed with the young girl and signed her to a seven year contract. Like many of the girls he had under contract, Hughes had them watched and followed and apart from drama classes, forbade them to go out with anyone except himself.

When Greer decided to ignore Hughes, he bought the studio where she was working, RKO, and continued to try and control her. She married Rudy Vallee and Hughes was still undeterred. She told Hughes she loved Rudy. Hughes replied that she didn’t and she wasn’t going to work until she came to her senses. Jane said OK, I’ll just carry on having babies then.

Hughes later relented and Jane began to work in films again.

She appeared in a number of films in the 1940s and 50s including the 1952 remake of The Prisoner of Zenda.

In television she joined the cast of Falcon Crest and Twin Peaks in her later life before retiring in 1996. In 1975 she appeared with Robert Vaughn in the Columbo episode Troubled Waters in which Columbo finally tracks down guest murderer Vaughn.

Jane Greer died of cancer in 2001 aged 76.

All the images above were reproduced via Wikipedia Creative Commons.

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